About

Social Protocol Labs is the applied AI research lab for regulated finance.

Founded in 2022 as a consulting and research firm in digital assets, risk management, and token-based financial infrastructure, we kept meeting one problem as AI entered financial services: the gap between what AI systems can do and what regulated institutions can deploy. We now work at that gap, with the rigor we brought to crypto risk and compliance.

Engagements range from executive strategy briefings to hands-on implementation advisory for teams deploying AI in regulated workflows. Our focus is regional banks and financial institutions in the $10B–$100B asset range: institutions that must match the nationals on technology without their budgets.

We are not a consultancy or a systems integrator. We do first-principles research, working prototypes, and integration architecture for problems with no established industry pattern.

I was the designated CTO for Visa’s FedNow pilot, leading the technology team through the bid, demo, and pilot with the Federal Reserve in New York and Boston. Before that I led engineering on Open VisaNet, Visa’s $200M program to move mainframe transaction processing to a distributed architecture handling upwards of $11 trillion a year. As Chief Systems Architect I authored the Visa Token Service API specification and delivered OPERA, Visa’s real-time operational monitoring platform, with a team of 15 in six months.

After Visa I co-founded Zenda, a healthcare fintech building tax-efficient HSA and FSA debit cards, and led engineering and platform architecture where healthcare and financial regulation meet. InComm Payments acquired Zenda in 2022.

I then built the whole stack, infrastructure through product, for Jewel Bank: a Bermuda-chartered digital asset bank licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority under both banking and digital asset regimes, and the first attempt at a stablecoin-native bank. It ran out of funding in 2024 and is restarting.

Three patents in mobile payment security, a BS in Electrical Engineering from IIT Roorkee.

Today I work with investor-backed enterprise software companies and regulated financial institutions on AI deployments where governance, risk, and control decide what ships. The gap between what AI can do and what an institution can defend is the work.

We run time-bounded advisory and research engagements with defined outcomes:

• Direct engagement with the founder. Every engagement is led by someone who has built and operated financial infrastructure at scale.
• Research-informed, practically focused. Recommendations come from our active research and operating experience.
• Designed for your existing infrastructure. We have built inside large-scale financial infrastructure and work within its constraints.
• Honest about what works. If AI is the wrong answer for your use case, we say so.

We complement internal product and engineering leadership. We do not do staff augmentation or open-ended retainers.